The Ad-Free Cellphone May Soon Be Extinct — ADVERTISING on your cellphone? — Yes, and soon. — Already, ads are creeping onto cellphones around the globe. At this rate, experts say, it will not be long before the 2.2 billion mobile phone users around the world consider it natural …

Is Radio Still Radio if There's Video? — Ted Stryker, a D.J. at KROQ in Los Angeles, considers it a perk of the job to wear shorts and T-shirts to work. But last Sunday as he dressed for the Grammy Awards, he pulled out his best blazer and a flashy belt buckle, knowing three video cameras …

Google Said to Violate Copyright Laws — A Brussels court ruled Tuesday that Google had violated copyright laws by publishing links to articles from Belgian newspapers without permission. Legal experts said the case could have broad implications in Europe for the news indexes provided by search engines.

Is Google News the Tail Wagging the News Search Dog? — Google News gets more press mentions than other news search engines. It gets more blog mentions, too. But, Yahoo News and AOL News have larger unique audiences. — So, why is the tail wagging the dog? Before we jump to any conclusions, let's do the numbers.

Online Video Industry Index — Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus — There are now so many companies vying to be the next YouTube, it's easy to lose track of them all. So let's take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the major players.

The Next Big Ad Medium: Podcasts — Advertisers will spend more than $400 million on podcasting by 2011, but they're still not sure who will be listening to them — Remember podcasting? While marketers have been busy uploading commercials to YouTube, the once-buzzed-about medium has spent …

T-Mobile CEO: VoIP will have no major impact — Don't expect new mobile phone services based on the Internet Protocol to become nearly as prevalent as those running over PCs. That's the view of Hamid Akhavan, CEO of T-Mobile International, one of Europe's largest mobile phone operators.

RIAA to Launch P2PLawsuits.com — Among other things, the recently leaked letter from the RIAA to ISPs revealed that the RIAA plans on launching a "website with information about the copyright lawsuits that should facilitate early settlement," to be located at P2PLawsuits.com …

Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database — Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. In this post Alex tests out and explores the emergent world of Yahoo! Pipes. He sees some interesting parallels with Relational Databases in the 90's, concluding that with pipes …

Our Valentine's day gift: out of beta and adding comments — Here at webmaster central, we love the webmaster community — and today, Valentine's Day, we want to show you that our commitment to you is stronger than ever. We're taking webmaster tools out of beta and enabling comments on this blog.

U.S. group wants Canada blacklisted over piracy — WASHINGTON — A powerful coalition of U.S. software, movie and music producers is urging the Bush administration to put Canada on an infamous blacklist of intellectual property villains, alongside China, Russia and Belize.

Music exec slams mobile entertainment experience — BARCELONA, Spain—The cell phone industry must improve the mobile music experience for consumers or risk losing out to new competitors like Apple, Warner Music Group's CEO warned Wednesday at the 3GSM World Congress.

Start-up demos quantum computer — update About a year from now, banks, pharmaceutical companies and other large institutions will be able to rent time on a computer that calculates by studying the behavior of a niobium atom, according to D-Wave Systems. — The Canadian company on Tuesday gave …